Remember Jason Donovan; or, How the SNP embraces homophobia

You may not have heard of Kenneth Gunn - indeed, you most likely have not heard of Kenneth Gunn. I had forgotten I had heard of him until yesterday, driving home through the Yarrow valley, in the aftermath of last week's local elections, we saw a fluorescent SNP placard in a farmhouse front garden; along with the SNP symbol (I have never known what it is meant to represent - a ribbon?) it bore the injunction, "Gunn". I asked my Borders-based friend if this was the same Kenneth Gunn I had come across a few years ago (he and his wife have done some very impressive charity work). It was indeed.

My Borders friend then made a passing comment to some past Selkirk scandal involving Kenneth Gunn and homophobic comments he had made. This immediately made me curious, and led me to this Southern Reporter piece from August 2009. It transpires that during a BBC Radio Scotland phone-in (about an interactive Glasgow exhibition which invited participants to write in and on the Bible, in an effort to 'write in' to it those who have traditionally been 'written out'), Kenneth Gunn got a little homophobia-happy and was slightly too open about his opinion of "so-called gays" (love that phrase) and atheists:

"Just look where this country has gone over the last 40 or 50 years. When we all went to church on a Sunday morning and we all prayed to the Lord Jesus Christ every Sunday morning, this was a much better country. Look where it is going now. We have got so-called gays who are really very sad people and we have non-believers and heathens, you know, running the country and running down Christianity."

The full transcript can be found in the Southern Reporter - if you read it, you will see that it is not the most vitriolic of homophobic religious rants that we have been subjected to over the last few years. Indeed, it is not the language or subject-matter of Gunn's tirade that I find interesting; what I find interesting is the reaction, or lack of it from the SNP.

There was absolutely no action from the SNP, other than to state that the "comments are a personal matter" and to ask Gunn to apologise that his comments had caused "offence". Other than that, Gunn has continued to represent the SNP, and to stand as their candidate at a number of elections. This sends a very clear message that the SNP not only tolerate homophobia, but are happy to be associated with it (rather like the issue of their refusal to condemn or even seriously engage with the sectarian violence associated with Scottish football, they are afraid to alienate what they see as their key electorate. What happened to politicians with ideals who wanted to make the world a better place: Wilberforce, etc. I know I sound naive, but seriously, this is low - exploiting homophobia, sectarianism, etc. in order to maintain support).

I couldn't help but be reminded of another homophobic incident involving another SNP-er - this time an MSP: Alasdair Allan. Allan is the MSP for the Western Isles (and - incidentallty - originates from Kenneth Gunn's own stomping ground) and, in 2008, was accused (by a political enemy) of "walking hand-in-hand" with "his boyfriend [...] enjoying the beautiful weather" (It was also suggested that this show of decadent perversion took place on a Sunday - not being an inhabitant of the Western Isles, I'm not sure whether breaking the Sabbath is more or less sinful than sodomy).

Kathleen Jamie: "not all primroses and otters"

I am a sucker for aura. Walter Benjamin was never wrong, and so it is that live music frequently moves me to tears while back home on the CD player the same music, played or sung by the same individuals, can sound utterly banal. There are of course many notable exceptions - but, nevertheless, my CD collection is littered with mediocre albums of bands and artists who have since vanished into a well-deserved obscurity, and yet whose concerts I can still recall with a vivid, palpable sense of the wonder and reverie into which their music sent me. 

And yet I never learn... I still buy the CDs of soon-to-be-forgotten artists - and sometimes, now, it as much as a memento of that reverie, as it is a statement of belief in the true talent of the performer. Book readings are the slightly more grown-up equivalent: I enjoy attending them; I always go determined not to buy anything and find myself two hours later with a buzzing mind, waiting in the queue to have my book signed by the author. And so it was tonight that I found myself sitting opposite Kathleen Jamie, telling her about my childhood immersion in Gavin Maxwell, and about Kathleen Raine and rowan trees (although I may have mistakenly referred to Raine as "Kathleen Jamie". Oh dear).

In explaining the falling away of the aura of a work of art in the process of its reproduction, Benjamin turned to nature, and to the "aura" of natural objects, writing of, "a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you," and the way in which we experience their "aura" simply by looking at them. For Benjamin, "aura" is tied up with our relation to objects - and with immediacy, and therefore authenticity. If an object is a reproduction, how to therefore know one's position to it: if I am looking at a mountain, I know I am looking at a mountain; I know how big or small I am in relation to it, and how near or far from it, and also that I am looking at it right now, ergo it exists. If, however, I am looking at a fibre-glass mountain, every certainty about my relation to that original object is thrown into flux: I don't know if the mountain even exists. 

For Benjamin, the desire to reproduce objects is rooted in the desire to "bring things 'closer' spatially and humanly"; i.e. to have and to hold - to own - these objects, even if only in replica. Benjamin was, of course focussing on the "work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction", and not on the natural world, however, were he to have cast his gaze towards "relics of nature in the age of mechnanical reproduction", Kathleen Jamie would have been able to provide him with at least one significant example: the replacement of the famous whale jawbone on Berwick Law with a fibreglass replica.

Whales and their bones - latter day relics - appear throughout Jamie's most recent collection (and my most recent purchase): Sightlines. I have only dived in deep to a few pages here and there so far, but feel the same sense of excitement that I get when reading the opening pages of "Ring of Bright Water." Hearing Jamie talk was to be reminded of the magic of reading and writing about nature, the alchemic preservation it can enact, and the tingling sense of "closeness" to the natural world which it can enable - without recourse to any attempts at Benjamin's aura-killing replication.